Tyler Volk

On his book Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be

Cover Interview of July 11, 2017

The wide angle

All scholarship involves being diligent in seeking and
finding of patterns. It doesn’t matter what the field is. We might be
considering cultural studies, anthropology, botany, chemistry, linguistics: It
doesn’t matter. The kinds of patterns, the kinds of relationships, of course
differ greatly. That is why there is loads of work to do in all research departments
of all universities.

Slightly more than 20 years ago I wrote a book called Metapatterns
Across Space, Time, and Mind. I was enthralled with the perception of
system dynamics and functionalities that occurred across scales of systems.
These functionalities included borders, binaries or two-part systems, the issue
of centralization versus decentralization, nestedness of components within
systems, and metapatterns of time, such as cycles, arrows, breaks or relatively
sudden changes in the structures and behaviors of things. My current book was
conceived as a follow-up to Metapatterns, without knowing what I would
write. I just knew there was material there waiting to be plucked.

So, I am doing merely what all good scholarship involves. It’s
just that I’m taking the field of study to be this lived universe of all
things. It might seem a little crazy. But I’ve been teaching metapatterns and writing
a few technical articles about them. I was sure that material involving
commonalities—really interesting commonalities—was (and still is) there to be
found and thought about.

Many of the scholars that I’ve been aware of who do this
kind of open scale research use mathematics. I refer to the highly developed
forays of mathematics in complexity theory, network theory, fractals, and more.
But I’m taking what I like to call an architectural approach. Much has been
seen and described, diagrammed and photographed, and understood through the
logic of language. In this way, I believe my ideas directly connect to
scholarly fields that are not so mathematical.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011